Hill fight on No Child Left Behind looms
Senate education committee leader Sen. Lamar Alexander says he wants to work out a bipartisan deal this spring to rewrite the landmark education law No Child Left Behind.
But last week, he released a discussion draft of the bill that was anything but.
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He and other congressional Republicans are angling to revamp rules about how often students are tested, how much power the education secretary should have, the amount of control states have over education policy as they collect billions in federal dollars, when to intervene in schools deemed failing and more. The debate kicks off at a hearing Wednesday on testing.
The coming debate may be the most dramatic congressional fight over education in more than a decade.
Alexander and his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Sen. Patty Murray, have said repeatedly they want to work in a bipartisan fashion but have yet to begin working together. Alexander has said that his discussion draft is just the start of a long process on No Child Left Behind that will include taking the bill through committee and amending it, and he has had discussions about rewriting NCLB with almost every member of the committee, including multiple conversations with Murray.
But the vision Alexander has sketched out so far didn’t take Murray’s priorities into account and Democratic aides saw it only hours before it was released to the public. The move has left many in the education world speculating — and some convinced — that working across the aisle going forward will be onerous.
“It’s totally clear this is entirely partisan,” one lobbyist said. “It’s crazy.”
Alexander doesn’t think so. “Of course it’s a bipartisan process — there’s no other way to pass a law in a Congress that requires 60 votes in the Senate and a presidential signature,” Alexander said. “It’s the job of the majority to offer a suggestion, which is the chairman’s discussion draft, and then we’ll do our best to work in the committee to get a bipartisan bill.”
Already, priorities and position papers are flying. The White House has been meeting with education groups to build support that could stand up to the Republican Congress on accountability and equity issues, several education advocates said. Education Secretary Arne Duncan outlined his priorities in a speech, saying he wants to keep many of NCLB’s testing requirements, as well as the requirement that the government intervene in low-performing schools. But the White House hasn’t dived into reauthorization. And comments on NCLB – and K-12 education in general – were absent from last night’s State of the Union address.
Should schools have to test students every year?
Alexander raised eyebrows last fall when he indicated he might be willing to get rid of the law’s annual testing mandate. No Child Left Behind requires schools to test students in reading and math each year from third through eighth grades and once in high school. And students must be tested in science once each in elementary, middle and high school. The tests results are used to track student progress, school performance and though not required by NCLB, in some places
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